Restorative Justice in Africa: Fruits of Networking
Interest in restorative justice is growing throughout Africa. In this article, Marian Liebmann, a restorative justice trainer in the UK, describes how a conference in Lagos, Nigeria allowed individuals from different countries to connect and share experiences.
About seven years ago I received an e-mail starting ‘Dear Marian’
from Brenda Brainch in Kenya, about family mediation. I realised she
was probably looking for Marian Roberts, then working for National
Family Mediation. Fortunately I knew her so was able to put Brenda in
touch. Brenda is a CEDR1 -trained mediator working in
commercial mediation and trying to promote mediation of all kinds. She
started the Dispute Resolution Centre in Kenya and more recently helped
to found the African Mediation Association (AFMA). When I explained
that most of my work was in restorative justice (RJ), she was
immediately interested, so we kept in touch over the years via e-mail.
Brenda hoped there might be opportunities for RJ in Kenya.
An invitation
In June 2007 Brenda contacted me to say she was passing my name to a
colleague of hers, Kehinde (Kenny) Aina, a lawyer in Nigeria. Brenda
had been funded by the British Council to work with Kenny and others on
ADR2 , including a conference in 2006. Kenny is an
enthusiast about ADR and mediation, and founded the Negotiation and
Conflict Management Group (NCMG) in 1996, to establish the first
Multi-Door Courthouse (MDC) in Lagos in 2002, followed by further ones
in other Nigerian cities. He organised the first ADR Summit in 2006 and
for the second one in 2007, he wanted to have RJ as the main topic.
After contact with Kenny, I agreed to talk on Restorative Justice in
the UK and Europe.
The conference was entitled ‘The 2nd NCMG African ADR Summit:
Restorative Justice, Peace-Building and Economic Development in Africa
– the Role of ADR’ and took place in Lagos 30-31 October 2007. I
arrived a day earlier and was able to see the Lagos Multi-Door
Courthouse, where court rooms had been converted to mediation suites,
to give a choice between mediation, arbitration and litigation. For the
conference, Kenny had gathered speakers from all over the globe –
United States, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and me from the UK. Although
I had been diffident about travelling such a long way (carbon
footprint, etc), my journey was one of the shorter ones. We were all in
the same hotel, so one of the joys of the conference was the
opportunity to network with the other presenters, and learn more about
their work.
Conference in Lagos
The first day of the conference was devoted to RJ. Anyone who has been
to West Africa will know that conferences and gatherings begin with
many formal welcomes and speeches from eminent persons, in this case
mostly senior judges from Nigeria. There were about 120 conference
participants, mostly lawyers.
The RJ session began with Justice/ Professor Janine Geske, Director of
the Restorative Justice Initiative at Marquette University School of
Law, Milwaukee, US. She had given up a high-ranking post as Justice to
the Supreme Court to start an RJ Initiative, and showed a moving DVD of
her work in prisons, bringing together victims, offenders and community
in circles to talk. Next, the Hon Justice Gummi, the Chief Justice of
the Federal Capital Territory, spoke on RJ and the Criminal Justice
System in Nigeria, finding much in common between RJ and traditional
African justice – and declared that prisons were incongruent with this.
Then I spoke on ‘RJ and VOM: UK & European Experience’
3 – a tall order in 20 minutes! The situation in the
UK is now so complex (in terms of legal provisions for RJ) that I wrote
a comprehensive handout for the detail, and only included a
‘broad-brush picture’ in my presentation. The final input of the
morning was on plea-bargaining, which some Nigerian lawyers see as part
of RJ4. This raised so much controversy that all the
questions in the following Open Forum session were directed to it, and
none to RJ.
The afternoon session included contributions from the Inspector General
of the Police and the Comptroller of Prisons. Both had sent
substitutes, who therefore had to read their papers in full. There was
an interesting paper on Sharia Law and RJ/ ADR, noting similarities
(e.g. the concept of ‘Sulhu’ – bringing conflict to an end, removing
bitterness) and differences. Then Uju Agomoh, Director of the
NGO5 Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action
(PRAWA), spoke about the potential for RJ in Nigeria.
Previous RJ training
Uju had invited me in 2001 to train victim-offender mediators in
Nigeria, Ghana and the Gambia, for the DFID6 -funded African
Transformative Justice Project. Uju saw RJ as very much part of African
heritage, which had been displaced by the British legal system imposed
through colonial rule. One of the reasons for looking to a British RJ
trainer was to persuade the African British-trained judiciary that RJ
was OK, and could be implemented within existing laws! This
training had taken place in 2001, with one week in each of the three
countries.
The training had been successful, but despite large stakeholder
meetings in each country, financial support had not been forthcoming to
take it forward in Nigeria (some work continued in Ghana prisons for a
while, and there is a court mediation service in the Gambia). So this
conference was an ideal opportunity to put Kenny and Uju in contact –
with the result that Uju was able to contribute a presentation. She
spoke with passion about bringing RJ back to Africa, involving victims,
offenders and the community – perfectly possible within the current
law. ‘We can do it – it depends whether we decide to do it.’
Conference: ADR and Peace Awards
The second day of the conference was devoted to ADR, especially
mediation, in the commercial sector, and included presentations by John
Brand from South Africa, Jimmy Muyanja from Uganda, Kate Kopischke from
the US (who mediates community disputes on projects funded by the World
Bank’s private-sector lenders) and Lesley Agams (the Country Director
of Ashoka), as well as Nigerian lawyers. Brenda Brainch encouraged
people to join the newly-formed African Mediation Association and Kenny
Aina reminded participants that they could join the NCMG to stay
abreast of developments in Nigeria. An Open Forum session with many
impassioned contributions (e.g. about poverty; and the Niger Delta
conflicts) concluded the conference at lunchtime.
Later that evening everyone attended the presentation of this year’s
Peace Awards, initiated by Kenny at the conference in 2006. The 2007
individual awards went to Kofi Annan and Judge Kayode Eso, a Nigerian
long-time patron of the NCMG, the corporate award to Lagos State, and
the press award to the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The
occasion took place at the new Civic Centre in Lagos and was
accompanied by an evening of speeches and dinner.
More networking
A further piece of networking concerned the speaker from Uganda, where
I had also trained mediators (and some trainers) in 1999 and 2002.
Again, lack of funding had prevented the initiatives lasting very long
at that time. But Jimmy Muyanja was captivated by RJ – and knowing that
there are at least two RJ trainers in Uganda (with whom I am still in
touch) gave him the idea to pursue funding for it. (There should even
be a manual for the ‘Uganda RJ Model’ that we developed together.) So I
returned home feeling that this trip, though short, had been valuable
in terms of hopefully furthering RJ in at least two African
countries.
Since my return, I know that Jimmy has been in contact with the two
trainers in Uganda, and they are enthusiastic about taking things
further. Uju and Kenny plan to stay in touch to develop a pilot
project. I have been sending AFMA leaflets to anyone I know who is
working in conflict resolution in Africa. I have put people in touch
(and vice versa) with an RJ academic from a university in Florida, Mark
Davidheiser, who has started an African Working Group to bring people
together (He had contacted me after seeing articles of mine on the
web). There is also an Africa Quaker Peace Network, so there seem to be
many people working in the same direction.
Let’s hope that all these initiatives and enthusiasm can bring about a
resurgence of RJ within the African justice systems. And many thanks to
Kenny for giving an extra push to this project with his dynamism in
organising the conference.
______________________________
Footnotes:
1 Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, concerned with
commercial mediation, based in London.
2 Alternative Dispute Resolution, a term used in the
commercial sector to cover mediation, arbitration and other forms of
dispute resolution which are alternatives to litigation.
3 I am aware that this title is somewhat misleading as the
UK is part of Europe, but I could not think of a more accurate one
without getting tied in knots!
4 I thought it was not generally part of RJ in the UK – does
anyone in the RJC have views or experience of this?
6 Non Governmental Organisation
7 Department for International Development, part of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. DFID has given grants
to several projects around the world, including several in the criminal
justice sector.
Web sites and useful contacts
Negotiation and Conflict Management Group (NCMG), Nigeria
www.ncmggroup.org
E-mail: info@ncmggroup.org
Kenny Aina: kennyaina@aol.com
Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA),
Nigeria
www.prawa.org
E-mail: info@prawa.org
Uju Agomoh: ujuagomoh1@yahoo.co.uk
African Mediation Association (AFMA)
Brenda Brainch: mediate@wananchi.com
Africa Peace and Conflict Network
www.africaworkinggroup.org
Mark Davidheiser: mdavidhe@yahoo.com
Hamdesa Tuso: tuso@nova.edu
Jean-Mathieu Essis: essis@nova.edu
Africa Quaker Peace Network
Clerk: Colin Glenn: colin@phaphama.org
Assistant Clerk: Hezron Masitsa: hmusotsi@yahoo.com.
Other contacts (Kenya): Malesi Kinaro: malesiekk@yahoo.com
Bridget Butt: bridget_butt@yahoo.com
Brikama Mediation Center, The Gambia
Momodou Gassama: mceegass@yahoo.com
Marian Liebmann
March 2008
